3 reasons Hosted Exchange still leads the way

It requires an investment of both hardware infrastructure and software licensing, and as a reseller, you’ll probably benefit from a support agreement with your customers to give them peace of mind.

Hosted Exchange, on the other hand, is a service that allows your customers to securely access their email from anywhere, on any device. On-premises Exchange servers are replaced with a cloud-based service, providing all the features and benefits of local Microsoft Exchange (including calendars, public folders and tasks) for a predictable and scalable per user, per month fee.

The benefits of Hosted Exchange are numerous – the cost of ownership is mitigated because on-premises hardware and software licensing are no longer required, there’s no ongoing server maintenance costs (plus lower energy bills), while scheduled Exchange updates are carried out at no additional cost. Improved and assured reliability comes with Hosted Exchange, plus it’s anytime, anywhere access to email.

There’s less support revenue for you as a reseller, but there is guaranteed, predictable revenue each month, plus the knowledge that your customers can enjoy a robust and scalable solution. Here’s a quick rundown of our top three reasons why we believe Hosted Exchange still leads the way.

Huge Mailbox Storage

When provisioning Hosted Exchange 2016 with Giacom, we’ve increased the mailbox storage limit from 125GB to a huge 250GB – these remain fully flexible so our resellers can benefit from bigger profits. Hosted Exchange Enterprise SKU has unlimited mailbox storage (bundled with email security and free migration) and it’s important to note that organisations staying with HEX 2010 and 2013 have 125GB only.

Great New Features and Easy Migration

There’s a whole host of incremental improvements in Hosted Exchange that we think are worth checking out. First of these is the updated search functionality that not only allows faster and deeper (doubled to 10,000 mailboxes per search), but also provides search suggestions and refiners to help administrators find information with contextual filters such as date of send, recipient and so on.

Mobility is key to Hosted Exchange 2016 – optimised support to a wider range of tablets and smartphones is an important update with the change from HTTP to MAPI and the Outlook Web Access and Outlook App experience has been updated with new views and features.

One of the most requested features for compliance is also available in HEX 2016 with encryption in transit and at rest. This means that customer email is now secure at all times in their mailbox.

We’ve implemented a new Active Directory tool so that users will be able to synchronise their password when using their mailbox across devices. Finally, your customers can send emails on behalf of others, including calendar requests and company-wide emails.

With the retirement of Hosted Exchange 2010 in January 2020 and the end of Microsoft support for the solution, migration to 2016 needs to be considered. Our team of engineers, support staff and Account Managers are always on hand to take you through migration step by step, working out of hours to minimise customer impact and ensuring access to emails via Outlook Web Access during the process. We strive to make migration smooth and pain-free, regardless of the environment your customers’ mailboxes have originated from.

Huge Reseller Margins

In contrast to Office 365 where your margin opportunities are relatively constrained, our Hosted Exchange 2016 solution gives you much more scope to earn bigger margins. You’re free to charge whatever you see fit on Hosted Exchange SKUs and, don’t forget, the Enterprise SKU now also comes bundled with Dropsuite Hosted Exchange Backup which is a brilliant value-added solution.

Discover more about our Hosted Exchange platform by calling our Account Management team on 0333 332 0888.